[MUSIC]

Again, Mozart did once write a piano sonata

that was structurally a bit
off the wall, the so-called "Alla Turca"
Sonata, K. 331.
But, he then went about his business as if
this had never happened,
writing sonatas that followed the
classical paradigm precisely.
For Beethoven, by contrast, Opus 26 proves
to be just the beginning.
In fact, he immediately ups the ante with
the two sonatas Opus 27.
Even the name of these works breaks
ground:
Each is called "Sonata quasi una fantasia."
Now the notion of fantasy and sonata
united is not entirely new.
But in the past, the idea was to present
them as distinct works in a sequence,
their opposed natures being the very point of the
exercise.
Mozart for example wrote a Fantasy and
Sonata in C minor.
There's no hard evidence that he intended
them to be
played together but they certainly seem
like a perfect fit,
and many generations of pianists have
programmed them that way.
But again, the success of the idea comes
from the
searching, free-form, constantly unsettled
fantasy giving way, almost resolving
even, to an extremely structured sonata.
It surely isn't an accident that the first
movement of the sonata, which naturally
follows directly on the heels of the fantasy,
is really quite square in its phrase
structure.
It is highly dramatic music, but mainly
because of the character of its themes.
The construction of the movement is highly
regular,
answering the questions that the
fantasy poses.
It is chaos making way for order.
So, to have a work that is simultaneously
fantasy
and a sonata surely seemed like a
contradiction in terms.
The title makes really a bold statement
which Beethoven
has clearly been leading up to with Opus
26-that something other than sonata form and
the standard succession
of movements can be the glue that holds a
sonata together.
Again, this notion had an enormous impact

on 19th-century composers.
The Schumann Fantasy, one of the really
greatest piano
works of the Romantic generation, was
originally titled Grand Sonata.
And indeed, given the way that it takes
large-scale forms and injects an amazing
degree
of freedom and harmonic instability into
them, one
could make an equally strong case for
either title.
And what was Schumann's motivation in writing the fantasy?
It was to raise money to build the statue
of, who else?
Beethoven.
The Schumann is a particularly useful example,
but Mendelssohn also wrote a work
which is sometimes known as Fantasy, other
times as the Scottish Sonata.
In fact, the list goes on and on.
And with Beethoven's Opus 27 sonatas, it
really
isn't simply a question of a new title.
In form and in atmosphere, these pieces
are utterly unlike
anything Beethoven had ever written or
really like anything he would write
subsequently.
They're also notably unlike one another.
The man really didn't ever run out of
ideas.
The first of the two sonatas is like Opus54
00:03:11,540 --> 00:03:14,410
in that none of its moments are in sonata
form.
While the works are very different,
that, in itself, is significant.
After 13 sonatas that each begin with a
sonata allegro,
now he's 0 for 2.
It serves as confirmation that he really
is going in a new direction.
But the real innovation in Opus 27 Number60
00:03:29,430 --> 00:03:32,190
is that there are no breaks between the
movements.
Now, the variations first movement of
Opus 26 was nearly without precedent,
and many features of it would have
certainly raised Mozart's eyebrows.
But this is really unheard of.
And Beethoven uses other techniques to
further blur the boundaries between the
movements.
The first movement itself is interrupted in the middle by
an unrelated idea and a drastically faster
tempo.
This is the first time that Beethoven
writes

a single sonata movement in more than one

tempo,
excluding works with slow introductions--which is another story entirely.
The third movement doesn't resolve.
It finishes on a trill on the dominant-[MUSIC]
a half-cadence that needs the last
movement to resolve it.
And just at the moment that the exuberant
last movement seems headed for its climax,
it stops, again unresolved, and launches
into an extended
quotation, a callback I'd say to the
inward third movement.
This is doubly significant because the
last movement
was already somehow the weightiest of the
four.
Which the addition of the quotation it
acquires
a gravity which the rest of the piece
doesn't have.
And so, the re-balancing of the Beethoven
sonata continues with this work.
But back to my original point.
Even without the literal linking of the
movements, there are plenty of things
in this piece which confuse the listener
as to where one ends and another begins.
Add to that the lack of space between movements,
and you see that this is a work
which not only helps redefine the role of each
movement within the sonata,
it suggests that the movements themselves
cannot be truly separated out.
That is a radical notion.
To me Opus 27, Number 1 does feel more
unified than Opus 26.
And not only because there's no silence in
it to disturb the unity.
There is a sense of inevitability in the
way the movements follow one another.
Whatever character is missing from one
movement is invariably the central one in the next.
So the grace of the first movement is
answered by the fidgetiness of the second,
is answered by the inwardness of the
third,
and so on.
But while the work is amazingly daring-and I would not call it unsuccessful, by
any means-There is still a bit of self-consciousness
in the experimentation.
One perceives it as, if not really a
capital I "Idea," at least an experiment.
And, indeed, he never returned to it.
No subsequent sonata links all of the
movements.
As Beethoven goes along, he finds less

literal, but ultimately

more meaningful, ways of uniting the
movements of his sonatas.
Still, this is really a marvelous piece,
and
since, unfortunately I'm not going to play
it,
because we have a limitation of time,
I really highly recommend that you give
it a listen on your own time.
Let's take a short break for a review question.